The southern area of the constituency, Clapham Town, it consists of predominantly residential and terraced houses, populated by commuters and families. Clapham Town has provided large sums of Conservative support in recent times. At the northern tip of the borough is the Bishop's ward which has multiple million-pound flats which overlook the River Thames, Houses of Parliament and Lambeth Palace.

Since a 1989 by-election, the seat has been represented by Kate Hoey. Continuing a history as a safe seat for Labour, since her 1989 election, Hoey has consistently achieved majorities of 9,100 to 20,200 votes. The 2015 result made the seat the 105th safest of Labour's 230 seats by percentage of majority.[2]

Despite Hoey being a prominent campaigner for leaving the European Union, Vauxhall voted to remain in the EU by 77.6% in the national referendum on 23 June 2016.[3] In the 2017 general election, this led to her seat being targeted by pro-Remain organisations and high-profile individuals seeking to oust her in favour of the pro-EU Liberal Democrat candidate.[4] There had been a change.org petition calling for Hoey's deselection as the Labour candidate for the seat; however, due to party rules this was unsuccessful.[5][6] It was tweeted by the local Labour Party in February 2017 that they would be "distancing" themselves from Hoey over her support for Brexit. Subsequently, the tweet has been deleted and the local party has confirmed that she has their "full support".[citation needed] While Hoey did significantly increase her majority in 2017, the Liberal Democrat vote total more than trebled, and they moved back into second place having fallen to fourth behind the Conservatives and the Greens in 2015.

Three Liberal Democrat councillors represented the Bishop's ward from 1990 to 2014; they subsequently lost the three ward seats to Labour, as did the sole Liberal Democrat councilors in the Oval and Vassall ward's. They failed to gain them back in 2018.

At the 2018 council elections, Labour won all of the ward seats in the constituency. The Liberal Democrats finished second in the wards of Bishop's, Oval, Stockwell and Prince's. The Conservatives finished the runner up in Clapham Town and the Green Party in Vassall, Ferndale and Larkhall.